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22 March 2001, Computational Logic Seminar, Rosella Gennari

22 March 2001, Computational Logic Seminar, Rosella Gennari
Speaker: Rosella Gennari
Title: Soft Constraint Frameworks
Date and Time: Thursday March 22, 2001, 16:00
Location: Room P.327, ILLC, Plantage Muidergracht 24, Amsterdam

Abstract:
Due to their 2-valued semantics, in some real-life situations, hard constraints may not be sufficient to model a problem:

  • information is incomplete, undetermined or uncertain, in that we can only set a preference on values up to a certain degree of knowledege/ignorance;
  • there exist no solutions to the problem, because the whole hard constraint set is inconsistent;
  • the problem is too difficult to solve, yet we need to find an instantiation for all variables that satisfies the given constraints, ``as many/much as possible''; in particular, that happens whenever there are fixed resource bounds.

Hence, ``soft'' constraints come to be handy: loosely speaking, given a domain variable, a soft constraint is just like a hard one except that the former can assign, to each domain tuple, a ``preference'' or ``uncertainty'' degree further than 0 or 1. Fuzzy and semiring-based constraints are examples of soft constraints.

Different authors have cooked up their own frameworks to define and compute with soft constraints. The best known is the semiring-based framework, by Bistarelli et al., Journal of ACM '97 - a semiring is just a universal algebra with two binary functions and two constants. In their seminal paper, Bistarelli et al. claim that all existing soft constraint frameworks can be translated into their semiring-based one; above all, partial and fuzzy constraint frameworks. Unfortunately, the semiring that they use to translate fuzzy and partial constraints is not the correct one; a simple example explains what goes wrong and why.

Lately, I've been working on a general framework for soft constraints and, above all, on a translation between constraint frameworks for `preserving solution sets'.

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/~mdr/ACLG/Local/seminar01-1.html.

Please note that this newsitem has been archived, and may contain outdated information or links.